Well, it’s been a pretty rubbish couple of weeks, but amidst the anxiety there are some good things.
This week Joe and I chat a bit about comfort. My thoughts were inspired by giving a talk on Sunday on 2 Corinthians 1:3-4 which really describes how we are comforted by God (largely through each other) and how we then have to pass that comfort on. So we live in this virtuous circle of giving and receiving comfort.
But I was also struck by the fact that in times of trouble, suddenly lots of things start speaking to you. And I began to wonder whether we aren’t looking at things the wrong way round. When bad things happen to us, our default position might be to blame God or the fates or whoever and generally shout ‘Why are you doing this to me?’
But what if we looking at the wrong bit? What if the primary work of God in our lives is not to make things happen to us, but to help us to look? What if one of the key roles of the Holy Spirit is to help us to pay attention?
So it’s not a sense in which we say ‘Why did God allow this to happen?’ As ‘This happened - now might God want me to discover in it?’ And what if God is really interested in what I might discover in it?
In a sense this is what the Old Testament often says, when it portrays God as punishing or smiting. I don’t believe that when bad things happen God is smiting you. But that doesn’t mean that God isn’t trying to tell you something. When things go wrong, you might start to look at who God is, to realise that, maybe, your image of God is wrong. In the Old Testament the biggest single issue is idolatry. Which is creating a wrong image of God. The biggest challenge to idolatry is always defeat and disaster.
So instead of spending so much time asking God for guidance, maybe we should just get on with stuff and pay attention to what is happening.
Whatever happens, God is always with us. I have been comforted this week not by random Bible verses, but by the promise that ‘I will be with you’. And my prayer, like Bartimaeus in the New Testament, is not just ‘Have mercy’, but ‘Rabbi, I want to see’.